James Marsden & Vince Vaughn Star

If you’ve ever seen a mob flick before, you’d be forgiven for assuming at first glance that you’ve seen a million movies just like Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice, the second feature from writer-director BenDavid Grabinski (Happily).

All the usual tropes would seem to be present and accounted for. There’s the gangster with the heart of gold (James Marsden’s Mike) who wants out of this ugly life. There’s the tragic love triangle between said gangster, his beautiful girlfriend (Eiza González’s Alice) and her husband (Vince Vaughn’s Nick), also a gangster and a far more vengeful one at that. There are corrupt cops, and reports of a mole, and an extra-special mystery assassin with an extra-nasty gimmick, who only gets flown in for the gnarliest jobs.

But then…there’s also the time machine. In the context of the story, it has the power to send someone back from the future in hopes of changing the past. In the context of the film, it possesses the ability to take all those well-worn elements and make them feel fresh again, by scrambling them into a sci-fi-action-comedy-thriller loaded with zippy style, upbeat humor and sneaky heart.

The time traveler in question is Nick, or rather a version of Nick from six months in the future. This Nick arrives in the present with bad news: It turns out tonight is going to be the death of Mike, who’s been falsely accused as the rat who got Jimmy Boy (Jimmy Tatro), dumb-bro son of the ruthless crime boss (Keith David’s Sosa), locked up. Fortunately, Future Nick has also come armed with a plan to stop it, the first step of which is to incapacitate Present Nick (Vaughn plays both).

But Present Nick is not about to go down that easy. The scene in which Mike arrives at his door to grab him — at the instruction of Future Nick, who hasn’t quite gotten around to explaining yet why there are two of him — is a total knockout of a sequence. Though the energy is desperate and messy, as the two men slam each other through furniture and smash each other with picture frames and trophies and whatever else they can get their hands on, the fight itself is impeccably choreographed, and shot to show it. It’ll be the first of several to inspire thoughts like “Damn, someone put James Marsden and his stunt double, Ross Kohnstam, in their own John Wick-style thriller.”

I’d be bummed there weren’t more of these action showcases if not for the fact that Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice has plenty of other delights in store as well — all set to a crowdpleasing upbeat soundtrack that bounces between ’90s electronica, ’80s synth pop and ’70s rock anthems.

One is its comedy, which is loose enough to yield a heated debate about the worst Gilmore Girls boyfriend or a very silly subplot about Jimmy Boy’s dick not working since he’s gotten out of prison, but not so shaggy as to sour into Apatovian self-indulgence. (It could probably do with fewer punchlines about different characters not having heard of common things like chloroform, sugar-free candy or the word “comeuppance,” but joke construction repetition is a relatively minor sin.) It helps to have a cast loaded with actors like Tatro, who can turn a sentence as simple as “I fucking love confetti” into a laugh line through the sheer perfection of his delivery.

Then there’s the sweetness underneath all the temporal shenanigans and graphically bloody shootouts. Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice is populated by characters who all look fairly thin upon closer consideration — among other things, I never fully understood how Alice wound up with Nick in the first place, or just how close Mike and Nick were meant to be. The key phrase there, however, is “upon closer consideration.” As played by Marsden, González and Vaughn, they have more than enough vibrancy and charisma to sell us on these people in the moment. And what emerges from their shared chemistry is an unexpectedly earnest story about regret and second chances.

“We’re the type of moron that can really only learn things from making mistakes,” Future Nick tells Present Nick at one point; it lands as both an expression of sorrow over the wrongs he can’t right, and one of gratitude for the opportunity to undo this one mistake in particular. The movie might not be especially profound in its emotions or complex in its themes — it’s more invested in blowing people’s heads off than rooting around their psychologies. But in moments like those, it’s possible to get a glimpse of the aching sadness at the heart of this whole premise.

It seems no spoiler to reveal that there turns out to be only so much Future Nick can fix, even with his extra six months of life experience. But given that Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice ends by teasing the possibility of sequels to come, we can hope this won’t be the last opportunity he gets to try.